To get the map round the right way and bring back under one roof various streams of my writing.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Community, respect, diversity and change

Australia, indelibly my country, frets more often than it fixes problems.

It is difficult
to reconcile our general apprehension with our continued second place ranking
by the UNDP on its Human Development Index.

My personal experience
with local community organisation and motivation in regional Australia in the
past 15 years has been the increasing difficulty in getting people engaged
except when there is something that irritates them personally or threatens real
estate. My speculations as to why have covered generational change,
Howard-and-since encouragement of personal focus and distrust and the arrival
of the flat screen TV and its outpourings.

In a 2008 local
government electoral campaign in a 'city' of fifty towns and villages over a
hundred kilometres of coast, I was conscious that some towns, on the Australian Bureau of Statistic's Index of Socioeconomic Disadvantage, ranked 'very
comfortable', over 1100, while at the core, the biggest town, ranked troublingly
disadvantaged at 820. The comfy big-number people were largely immune to or
annoyed by any suggestion of shared interest in addressing the problems at the
low score end.

My experience in
building, managing and shutting down a brain tumour support group over that
period was of building something strong and happy with over 300 emails a month
at times and wonderful mutual support... then evaporation of membership and of
contributions with the arrival of social media.

The current
information revolution is comparable to the turmoil of the renaissance 500
years ago in which the distribution of printing presses (see some context here) altered entitlement to
knowledge, distribution of ideas, challenges to established correctness and
empowerment of local languages. With a difference from now in the extent to
which new knowledge seemed 500 years ago to be sought everywhere possible, led
by the merchant barons of Florence, while the puddles of information and the
frissons of communication among the wider population now seem to grow smaller
and murkier.

Experience in
the last decade or so encouraging local empowerment and planning by
communities in Africa, via the internet, (here for example) has been with people who may write to say
"sorry I've been out of touch, it was the malaria again" and when one
writes with concern about Ebola over the border, the reply is that "I hope
it does not come here, we have plague in the next village now".

My impression is
that such people, minimally resourced and up against big problems daily, have
far more strength for adaptation to change and use intelligence for that, than
we do in comfortable Australia.

They also have as asset real community and
place in community, which is sometimes irksome, but is powerful.

My brief
experiences in remote Aboriginal communities are also of powerful community.
Government campaigns for indigenous literacy are not going to work if they
cannot begin to comprehend and respect that that small girl over there, just
starting school, whose kinship system says she is my mother or my aunty or my
grandchild, arrives at school with probably three languages and a universe of
special knowledge and understanding of the world.

Diversity
depends on respect. Respect is not just a polite utterance, it is a key to
community building.

Technological
dependency varies inversely with interest in local community;

economic
disparity inhibits meeting and communication and,

this year,
apprehension that "that person may be a Trump supporter" makes
conversation harder to start.

this (in 2017) is a new blog...

The word 'cephalophoria' suggested itself to me, is my own invention, as meaning "love of free mindedness". St Denis, my name saint who apparently could not spell, probably a common enough thing in the third century CE, was a cepalophore. That is a member of a small group of christian saints who somewhat prior to the manner of M Python, carried on doing what they were doing after their heads were cut off. Much impressing ladies for a bit, see here and below, St Denis on the wall of Notre Dame de Paris heading out of town after an encounter with the unwilling.

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I have worked through a number of blogs since 2000. I have had some eight domain names registered for different projects, of which only 'A Place of Info' remains. It resides in a storage space at ipower.com, on an internet superhighway in the USA. That storage space contains legacy folders of such projects previously 'live' with their own domain names. Here are two of them:

St Denis de Paris

A case of severe independent-mindedness - a cephalophore - heading out of Paris still preaching to closely admiring women, after an encounter with the unwilling circa 250CE. (image borrowed from Cool Stuff in Paris of Manning Leonard Krull, click on photo.)